Cisco Switch Monitoring with Web Console

Cisco's Web Console tool provides you with information on the status of your network switches from its monitor section. The monitor section gives you access to three main items: Trends, Port Status, and Port Statistics. Again, much of this data is available to you through the console.

Trends

The Trends page gives you three nice graphs that can show you some of the issues you may be experiencing. The main items that Cisco decided to graph are Bandwidth Utilization, Packet Errors, and Port Utilization for a specific port.

Port Status

Whereas Port Settings allows you to set the configuration of a port, Port Status allows you to see how those settings are currently operating. When working with port settings that are in Auto mode, Port Status allows you to see how those ports negotiated their settings. The status includes the Description, current connection Status, VLAN, Speed, and Duplex.

Port Statistics

Port Statistics can be valuable when attempting to troubleshoot switch issues. High numbers of errors over a period of time are indicators of a problem. From this page, you can clear the counters on a port and watch them go back up, expecting the error values on transmitted or received packets to be quite lower than the total transmitted or received.